Joseph Bowman

Joseph Bowman (10 November 1940-19 February 1968) was a Chief Petty Officer in the US Navy and a CIA and MACV-SOG special agent during the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Bowman took part in numerous special forces missions, ranging from the Bay of Pigs invasion to Operation Flashpoint and several actions in the Vietnam War, during which he was captured and killed by the Viet Cong in Laos.

Biography
Joseph Bowman was born in Atlanta, Georgia on 10 November 1940, the son of a World War II veteran. Bowman decided to join the US Navy at the age of seventeen in 1957, and he received Underwater Demolition Team training. Bowman would later be recruited into the CIA and assigned to Alex Mason and Frank Woods' team for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, during which they took part in a failed assassination attempt on Fidel Castro at a Cuban plantation. Bowman also took part in Operation Flashpoint in 1963, derailing the Soviet space program by assisting Mason and Woods in destroying a Soviet Soyuz rocket at the Baikonur cosmodrome. Bowman, Mason, and Woods would once again meet up in Vietnam after the Battle of Khe Sanh in 1968, and they had the objective of gathering intelligence on the covert Soviet military presence in Laos. During an incursion into Laos at Khammouane, the Americas were captured by the Viet Cong and were handed over to the Spetsnaz at a prison in Sekong, Laos. When Bowman refused to play Russian roulette with Alex Mason, a Spetsnaz operative cracked his skull open with a pipe, savagely beating him to death.